Dharma explorations by Stephanie Noble

From over fifteen years of sharing her understanding of Buddhist concepts

  • In a slump? Quick ways to enliven your life

    We’ve been exploring questions we can ask ourselves to enrich our lives. ‘What am I cultivating here?’ has lots of aspects to it, and our gardening metaphor enables us to understand the nature of skillful inner exploration. One of my students said that she noticed she was feeling down, but instead of succumbing or getting…

  • Wise cultivation sometimes calls for transplanting!

    I was traveling this week so there was no class. Still wisdom teachings are everywhere if we are present to notice. Visiting family and friends, it’s been a joy to see so many examples of skillful cultivation. To protect their privacy, I won’t name them or claim our relationship, but over the course of a…

  • Inquiry Series: Valuable Question #4

    The first three questions in this series — What is my intention here? What am I afraid of? and Is this true? — are useful any time we are feeling we are on the verge of being unskillful in any way. Or we can use them if feel we may have been unskillful and are…

  • Inquiry Series: Pause in place and set a kinder pace

    Over the past weeks we have been looking at three valuable questions — What is my intention here? What am I afraid of? and Is this true? These are particularly helpful when we feel something’s not quite right in our lives. For example, when we: – have difficulty in a relationship – get hurt feelings – feel…

  • Inquiry Series: Valuable Question #3: Is what I am telling myself true?

    In this series on self-inquiry, we have been posing powerful questions like ‘What is my intention here?’ and ‘What am I afraid of?’ The answers that come up are observable patterns of thought that form the stories we rely on to navigate a complex inner and outer world. Stories? Yes, the mind weaves stories out…